Blue Note Records — 767 Lexington Avenue, New York City

Blue Note Records — founded by Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff in 1939 — operated from several New York addresses across its history, but its spiritual and commercial centre was the studio address at 767 Lexington Avenue in Midtown Manhattan and later at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where engineer Rudy Van Gelder recorded the bulk of the label's most celebrated output. Blue Note is the most significant jazz label in history: its catalogue includes recordings by Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and dozens of others.

The label's aesthetic identity was as important as its musical content. Francis Wolff's photographs of sessions — intimate, high-contrast black-and-white images of musicians in concentration — defined a visual language for jazz that persists to this day. Reid Miles's sleeve designs, which combined Wolff's photographs with bold typography, created a house style so distinctive and influential that they are still collected and imitated. The combination of musical ambition, technical excellence (Van Gelder's recording quality was the finest available), and visual sophistication made Blue Note the definition of jazz as a serious adult art form.

Blue Note Records continues to operate and release recordings under the Capitol Music Group umbrella. The original Lexington Avenue address is gone but the label's legacy is maintained through its archive and ongoing artist roster. The Blue Note club — a separate commercial entity — operates at 131 West 3rd Street in Greenwich Village and is one of New York's premier jazz venues, though it was founded in 1981 and has no direct connection to the original label.